


Spark

by rowanoak



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recreational Drug Use, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 15:44:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4397708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowanoak/pseuds/rowanoak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carmilla finds herself bored of eternal life. The decades roll by and she only finds her condition worsening. Then she meets Laura Hollis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spark

**Author's Note:**

> Basically I just wanted to get down some headcanons about what Carmilla did during her centuries before Laura. This is by no means all she did but just some points. Plus, who doesn't love smitten Carm? Comments are appreciated seeing as this is the first fic I've posted here and the first Carmilla fic I've done ever.

When you were first turned, vampiric life seemed to hold so many possibilities. When you were not the caterer for your mother’s virgin buffet, you enjoyed pleasures that you could not in your oh-so-fragile human life. Things that could once kill you only pumped adrenaline through your veins. Things that would drop a grown man dead even in attempt gave you a burning lust for something even more intense. As you pushed passed the barriers of what would once leave you lifeless, you became more aware of your supernatural enhancements. Sure, your mother had briefed you on the perks that came with the bite, but one needed to experience them herself before she could fully comprehend them. You only needed a decade or two to become confident in your ability to pull off amazing feats without the harsh reality of a second death.

Things like taking a stroll to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and jumping from gigantic cliffs in the off the coast of Italy had been fun for about four decades, but soon you grew tired of testing your undead abilities. Once you reached an age where you knew you would be dead if you weren’t immortal, you realized why all the other vampires your mother had introduced you to seemed so bored all the time. At first you had knocked it up to being pretentious, which probably wasn’t wrong, but your adrenaline just didn’t work like it used to and it was hard to get that giddy kind of nervous you always had before trying to see if fire would hurt you, or if water would drown you. Their lives were predictable just like yours had become. Nothing would kill you so you had nothing to fear. Or so you had thought.

The years ticked by like minutes. You turned to different hobbies to occupy your time and distract you. You picked up a few instruments, you learned how to dance professionally, you picked up a dozen or so philosophy books and you became fairly decent at a few sports.

After returning from the earth in which your mother had oh-so-lovingly imprisoned you, you tried to quickly mesh back into the new world. Things had changed majorly since you had involuntarily “left”. Two world wars had apparently been a thing. Humans were so inane. Left to their own devices, conflict would always end in violence. Not that you could talk. You had your fair share of blood on your hands.

Mattie was a big help in getting you back to “normalcy”. She stayed by your side for nine years and helped you work through all the shit that came with nearly losing your sanity underground. You would always be indebted to her in your mind. She was there for you when your mother and Will had abandoned you. Eventually you pushed her away. You pushed everyone away. You didn’t like to be seen so weak, so vulnerable, in front of someone you looked up to. You didn’t reconnect with Mattie for another thirty years after that.

The PTSD that came with your entrapment beneath the ground was rather inconvenient. Sleeping was the hardest part. Occasionally you would dream of Ell. You would see her soft skin, her long curly blonde hair that splayed down her back and bounced when she laughed. You could see the rosy tint to her cheeks that appeared when you embarrassed her. Which you liked to do. A lot. But then the slight smile that graced your lips as you slept would shift into a frown as your dream of Ell took a turn. The edges of your vision would turn a blood red. It was a far different color from the red in her soft cheeks.

The scene changed and Ell was bleeding to death on a wooden table. Your mother had Will set a black coffin underneath the table to catch the blood as it dripped through the slits. You realized quickly that the coffin wasn’t meant for Ell. Will and another vampire (who you cannot remember the name of for the life of you) broke her ribs one by one with swift blows to her sides. The sides you had spent the night before caressing as she drifted to sleep. She cried out but you couldn’t run to her. As hard as you tried the table got farther and farther away. The crunch of bone grew louder in your ears as her fragile human body broke in front of you.

The scene changed once again, to your luck. Nothing, you thought, could be quite as bad as watching Ell’s precious blood pool into the bottom of a coffin as she screamed and screamed. That is unless, you were to be buried sixty feet under the ground in said coffin filled with said blood. Which of course, you were. In this scene you were completely surrounded by darkness. When you went to take a breath (that you really don’t need but you hadn’t broken the muscle memory of breathing in your years of life after death) your lungs filled with blood and you found yourself choking and gasping for air which only let more blood gush into your body. The darkness was never ending and you couldn’t breathe. Of course that didn’t kill you. You wouldn’t be so lucky. You slammed your forehead against the top of the coffin over and over and over. Your bones stuck out in awkward places from where your mother had your brother break your limbs in half before burying you. You weren’t going to die and you knew it. That would be too simple for your mother. She wanted you to suffer. She wanted you to lose your mind.

At this point of your dream you woke up, finally. At least you physically woke up. You rocked yourself back and forth on your bed as your mind relived the coffin. Your breath came in pants and you knew you were going to start hyperventilating even though it wouldn’t do a damn thing for your body. After you brought yourself out of the panic attack, you decided that you were just going to go as long as physically possible without sleep. That didn’t stop the attacks but it made them seldom enough that you could contain them somewhat. You made it about six months without sleeping before your body gave out and you passed out in a street in Berlin. Your mother found you (because she always found you) and took you back into her household as Will smirked all the way home.

You picked up smoking cigarettes in the 1950’s because you were too damn stressed not to and you don’t need your respiratory system anyways. The smoke filled your lungs and delivered a buzz to your head and it became something you craved. You briefly went from casual smoking to chain smoking during the 1960’s because why the hell not.

At the end of the 60’s you migrated to America (just until you had to return to Silas in another twenty years) and experimented with harder drugs which delivered you the kind of nervousness and adrenaline you hadn’t felt since your younger years. Even though you were as hopped up on drugs as every other hippie in the sixties you stayed away from Woodstock. Your vampire pretension (that you’re not sure when you gained) prevented you from standing in a crowd with half naked humans who reeked of pot and sex.

In 1972 you had a particularly bad trip on LSD. If the prospect of having a bad trip wasn’t enough, it surely didn’t help that hallucinations of Ell begged you to come closer to her only to have her run out of your reach as soon as you were sure you were close enough to touch her. A few hours after that incident you were a blubbering mess. After nine hours your trip faded away and you realized that the redhead you had taken the LSD with and had also been fucking for the past three months was nowhere to be found. She had the bright idea of tripping in the middle of a fucking forest, so you stumbled your way back through the middle of a fucking forest in New York in the dead of winter. Later you hunted her down and snapped her neck. Mostly because you were pissed off that she abandoned you during your trip, but also partly because you’re half sure you blabbed to her about your mother and Ell and your cursed walking of the earth for all eternity and that jazz. Couldn’t have that spreading around.

You spent part of the 1980’s in a log cabin in the woods of Iceland because America and Europe were a little too bright for your tastes. Sure it gave you a very lumberjack lesbian vibe, but you liked it. You almost fell in love there in 1984.

She was a twenty-six year old named Roslin. She was studying fine art at the Iceland Academy for Arts. Roslin was something special. She had blue eyes that lit up when she smiled and light brown hair that was always pulled back into a messy bun and short bangs that laid in a mess on her forehead. She was easy to be around. And of course, the sex was wonderful. Her sarcasm and wit almost matched your own which genuinely impressed you seeing as she had only been alive a fraction of the time you had. It was nice to discuss art movements and abstract ideas with her. After dating her for two years living with her for one of those you realized you didn’t love her and never could. She wasn’t Ell and you obviously weren’t moving on anytime soon.

You had left her a note on her nightstand because you didn’t want to be a complete ass. Thinking back on it, the note had only said “I’m sorry, I can’t stay here” with no further explanation, so that might have made an ass of you anyways. After Roslin, time started to pass quicker and quicker. You put a bullet to your head in 1994, not that you really thought it would do anything, but it was worth trying, you had figured. The late 90’s was all about finding new ways to kill yourself. You set yourself on fire a few times, jumped off a few skyscrapers in Chicago, you even tried to impale yourself with a stake. That one had hurt like a bitch but hadn’t done the job.

By 2000 you were depressed, suicidal, and still suffering from PTSD attacks on the bi weekly. You figured things like this came with eternal life. More time for the world to fuck you up. You always seemed to get worse when you visited your mother every twenty years at good old Silas University. You weren’t looking forward to returning in fourteen years.

By the time 2014 rolled around you were numb to almost everything in your life and made it no secret that you didn’t want to be at Silas. Everyone but mother, that is. Will got an earful about how tedious the ritual was. You found a girl, seduced her, lined her up like a pig to be slaughtered (or as mother called it, “unknowingly volunteered”) so that some ancient something could be appeased for another two decades.

You didn’t know what the hell it was. It didn’t matter what it was, either way. You went along with what your mother asked of you because you would be punished if you didn’t it was as simple as that. That is not to say that you didn’t secretly poke tiny holes in her plans to aggravate her, but it could hardly be called a rebellion. Nothing would ever make you rebel. Nothing would make you risk going back into the earth.

Laura Hollis. What kind of name was that? Laura derived from the Latin laurus standing for “bay laurel plant” and Hollis meant “lives by the holly trees.” Did her family have some obsession with plants? Seemed like it to you. She was annoying, stubborn, and easily riled up. She asked too many questions (God, you hated journalism majors) and always seemed to be complaining about something you were doing. At first you had not meant to be the “roommate from hell.” You honestly just didn’t care enough about your hygiene to give a damn about the state of your room. Depression can do that to you.

After a few days though, you took small pleasure in purposefully doing little things to piss her off. You could see the red hot anger building up inside of her as she glared at you with her chocolate brown eyes and her eyebrows furrowed when you threw a snack cake wrapper onto the floor. She had yet to completely explode on you but you were interested to see how long that would take. You threw a “you’ll get wrinkles if you keep your face like that, cupcake” her way, just to push her a little farther, and her frown deepened. You knew this was going to be fun.

You added shamelessly flirting with her on top of being the worst roommate ever just for kicks. No one could deny that she was hot, even if her annoying tendency to film every waking moment of your shared domestic life completely counteracted that assertion. And you knew she was at least physically attracted to you. If you could get some one-sided hate-sex out of this living situation you wouldn’t complain.

Your body was gorgeous and you were well aware of that fact. When you changed your clothes in the middle of the room you could feel her eyes on you, but in these moments she wouldn’t glare. The ever present smirk on your lips grew into a catlike grin as you caught her eye. A rosy tint appeared on her cheeks as heat rose to her face. She ducked her head down and returned to whatever she was doing on her computer. She had probably blogged about some nerdy Harry Potter relationship. Not that you had looked at her blog.

She went on day and night recording every waking and sometimes sleeping (which you found particularly invasive) moment in your dorm. She always talked to that damned camera. You thought briefly about just throwing it out the window. Another thing she could hate you for. She was on some crusade to find and bring back the missing girls of Silas University. You had laughed at her at first. She might have been tiny and angry but there was no way she could take on your mother. You knew if she kept meddling, your mother was going to do something about it.

As the weeks passed you and the nerd reached some sort of understanding. You would be generally horrible and excessively flirty, and she would deal with it the best she could. It wasn’t exactly a truce but it seemed she had learned that despite her constant nagging you were not going to be using a chore wheel anytime in the future.

You came back to Room 307 one night and found the pop tart curled up in her bed facing the wall. She was underneath a huge quilt that had different patches all over it that seemed to be illustrations of different events. You didn’t ask about it. She obviously wasn’t asleep because it was only 8:05, and at this time she was usually marathoning one of her substandard shows on Netflix. Determined to just ignore her and get on with your Camus reading, you plugged in your headphones and listened to Amy Winehouse belt out her soul (she really was too good for this world) as you carried on with some of Camus’s more difficult subjects.

Thirty minutes passed and you looked over to see if she was still in the same position as before. She was, but her sides shook as she took short breaths over and over. You took out one of your headphones and set Camus open against your stomach to call out “You alright over there, creampuff?” When she didn’t reply you became slightly worried. Only slightly. You gave a halfhearted groan at the effort it took to get up and walked over to the edge of her bed only to see that she was staring at the wall as tears leaked down from her eyes and wet her yellow pillow. Crap.

Silent crying only meant one thing, and that was undisputed brokenness. Children cried loudly for attention, adults cried loudly when they were angry or embarrassed. Your roommate cried softly and made an extra effort to not disturb you while she wept so she wouldn’t be found out. God, you really didn’t want to ask but you would look like a dick at this point if you walked away. Not that you cared what she thought of you, that much was clear, but your conscience (or what was left of it) told you to stay where you were.

“Hey, answer me.” You were about to place your hand on her shoulder to offer some form of pseudo-comfort, but you felt it might be weird so you stopped yourself and let your hand fall awkwardly to your side.

She buried deeper into her quilt and pulled the sheet over her head so that you could no longer see her face that was flushed from crying. You ripped the quilt off her without hesitation and threw it across the room. She sat up and glared at you in that semi adorable way she tended to, even if she had a snotty nose and teary eyes.

“I would ask if it’s something I did, but I’m pretty sure eating one of your cookies or hair in the drain wouldn’t cause-” You gestured towards her “this.”

Her glare softened and her gaze dropped down to her bed. “It’s nothing.” She mumbled solemnly. A few strands of her hair spilled down into her face and you resisted the urge to tuck them behind her ear. That would be really weird. Jesus, you needed a cigarette.

You decided to place your hands on your hips to keep them from doing anything stupid like comforting the pretty (and annoying) crying girl in front of you. “You sure, cutie? Did Long Red and Handsome break up with you? I’ve been looking for an excuse to break her nose.” That certainly wasn’t a lie.

She pulled up her knees to rest her chin on them, rolled her eyes, and gave you a half smile. “Danny and I aren’t dating.” She furrowed her brow, “I think…”

“So you’re sulking over here because they stopped making your favorite type of processed sugary snack? Terribly sorry, cupcake. Can’t say I’m sorry for your arteries.” You had thought (hoped) humor might make her lighten up.

She looked you in the eye for a few seconds, regarded you carefully. You didn’t know what she searched for but you guess it was sincerity in your concern. The both of you were not exactly friends.

She dropped her stare and played with her bed sheets before she whispered so softly that you probably wouldn’t have caught it if you didn’t have enhanced hearing. “Today is the anniversary of my mom walking out on us.” Whomp, there it was.

“Oh,” you started, “that bites.” Nice one, Karnstein.

“Yeah.”

You walked into the bathroom, grabbed the box of tissues, and tossed it to her. Afterwards you returned to your own side of the room and watched her (not stared, watched) while she mentally processed what just happened. After a few beats she smiled, genuinely smiled at you, snotty nose and all. Her eyes did that crinkly thing at the corners and her brown irises danced. You felt the same kind of nervousness you did when you jumped off your first cliff more than three centuries ago. It occurred to you that you were _fucked_ , so you did what you’d been doing with your emotions for centuries, you bottled it up, and stuck your headphones back in.


End file.
